Iris Dark once loved somebody, if only for a single night.
How on earth could that have happened?
This work contains implicit references to sexual acts, along with mentions of gore. It is not recommended for readers under the age of 16.
Kiss Kiss Fall to the Dark by xexnoncores
December 11th, 2013
Iris Dark does not like parties.
Truth be told, there’s never been a good reason for the disdain. “Good” in her mind constituted anything that climbed her stock portfolios higher, anything that put more workers in the field. Parties were perfect, therefore, for this avenue of domination, since they slurred together sociality, loose lips, alcohol, and intrigue into one convenient package for her to extract so easily with a simple tensing of her fist.
Maybe it was the people. Maybe it was the goddawful amount of noise that grated her ears like sandpaper. Maybe it was the nauseating manner the entertainers she hired pranced around with, their undulating voices and breathless song-chanting ringing like mud. Imagining herself in that position burned her in ways only Hell could hope to handle; it made her cringe in ways only the Earth’s mantle could sturdy itself against.
But when it was all over and everyone’s coin had purchased its fill, their influence landing in her lap with satin ribbons, velvet smiles, and congratulatory strokings of her swallowing ego—oh, that made it all worth it. It made the babbling of these fools worth it when she knew now everyone on the floor was indebted to her, looking to her and her company for guidance, for their empty hearts, for their ravenous and unending consumption which would only be sated by following her directions exactly.
She watches the party droll on from a dark, private room high above. Akin to an opera box, it is quartered off and filled with the most interesting of tonight’s appetizers. From golden apples plucked at the edge of the universe to cosmic deviled eggs containing the blueprints for zircon planets, every food has its throne and tablecloth. There is no way she of all people is going to let these pigs eat what really matters, after all. They will devour from citrine troughs while she will cut her tongue on diamond cutlery.
A short, gaudy auctioneer bellows a bloated string of numbers. Excited murmurs scatter as salivating chirps arise out of decorated mouths, spilling with pale wine, golden teeth, and dazzling jewelry.
Iris smiles as a frenzy cascades, two women fighting over the price of seven will-o-wisps in a jar. A relatively meager item, but it was going to sell for twenty times the asking price at this rate. When the lesser individual relents, her better other beams, unaware that the winner of this exchange is more satisfied with the size of the spent purse than the quality of the product sold.
Swirling a golden orb at the bottom of her wine glass, Iris takes a deep breath, her shoulders falling from stiffness. The sphere clinks against crystal in solid chords, nearly like that of chained birdsong, soothing her as she finally decides to sit down. She will need a massage later once all this hullabaloo wears off.
Taking a sip of an impossibly dark inebriant, a shadow lingers behind the plump tables full of food. Wordlessly, it stands still as stone, watching her in a dress white enough to make snow blush. The velvet carpeting this room obscures and obsfucates, dampening any semblance of existence or presence outside that which deigns itself to acknowledgement, to inerrancy.
Finishing the last drop, Iris does not notice anything, too drawn into her own mind of how tonight will proceed. Her shrewd head pleasures itself shamelessly with schemes of offshore bank accounts, sutured to liquidation firms readying themselves for a great collapse of the very particular intrigue driving tonight's clientele. After all, though curiosity drives profits, it is collapse which drives true ingenuity—that is when the next step of her Process will take place.
That is when she will find no one able to challenge her.
This spell of deep thought only breaks when that woman walks out into the cutting light. With hair as white as the moon, unraveling down to her ankles in strands of pure silver, she is now unmistakable, and totally, completely unmissable.
Iris gasps and bolts upward. She reaches for a gun in her pocket until the woman simply laughs, putting a glossy-nailed finger to her cheek.
“Ms. Dark, did I surprise you? My dearest apologies, I did not mean to intrude so rudely. You play a good game of hide-and-seek, so I did what I had to do.”
Her voice is a slurry of marble, dripping and plump. Iris scowls, not replying; instead, she now fully pulls out her pistol, hard metal glowering narrowed at its target. Her other hand clutches an escape rune scorched into her thigh.
“Although, it wasn’t exactly that hard!” she titters, now extending out all of her hand for her short nailwork to fully unfurl. They are bleeding with plastic rainbows drowning in pale resin.
“Truly, I mean that. It really wasn’t my fault your bodyguards got caught up with Mr. Carter’s…unfortunate circumstances tonight. Sir Boschendal was quite offended by the fact he slept with not just wife, but both of his mistresses too! Haha, you should have seen the fists flying…”
That goddamn idiot, Iris thinks as she sneers, finger going to the trigger. The woman smiles at her, putting both hands up in not a surrendering posture, but a conciliatory one.
“But I promise, there will be no one between us tonight,” she says with a bite of her lip. “I am quite aware of how much a lady like yourself values her privacy. Really, at a romp like this, who wouldn’t?”
She nods down towards a golden shower of lights and champagne popping off, cleaving into scuttling bodies quickly scrambling to a summoned dancefloor. Two microphones pass to Skitter Marshall, clad in a gaudy pastel suit, as he roars to hype up the crowd with a twirl of his cane and an artificially saccharine smile.
From feathered boas to starched ties, throngs of much-too-drunken people begin clamoring for his attention as he spouts some obviously, meticulously practiced platitude. The woman chuffs, crossing her arms with internal satisfaction that comes off him playfully pretending one more time before every attendant is fully entranced by his great pretending.
“It’s hard to believe you must call them your business partners,” she continues. “Especially him. They’re more like your lessers, like cattle to be reined in, only loosed when one needs a bull in a china shop.”
Iris says nothing, watching her. She’d much rather look a cobra in the mouth than pretend to give even half of a shit about Skitter’s buffoonery, no matter how necessary it may be.
“…It’s even harder to believe there are women like us who find those idiots attractive enough to waltz into bed with them…”
Iris’s glare hardens, but only because it puts a thought into her mind so hideous she could have retched more than a drunkard at it. Soon, over the crawling seconds, as she considers those words, it all falls, from a stony, furious brow to a curing concrete jungle, leaving her simply wondering how someone besides herself could have said something so resonant.
Her grip on the gun steels itself, but she steals a glance back at Skitter, soon back to that woman.
It’s been a while since someone has truly seen through their facades, she thinks to herself. …Interesting.
Iris Dark has had two glasses of wine tonight. The woman flashes a shiny, chrome-lipped grin at her as she grabs the neck of a bottle to pour another one, dropping another golden ball into it for the iridescent chill it was profanely crafted from the bodies of extinct dragons for.
She holds it out to her with hands that are smooth like pearls.
“…For you.” She raises it as if to toast. “I assume it would be uncouth of me to ask if I’m allowed to partake in the triumvirate of delicacies you’ve gussied up here for yourself, let alone allow the thought to have existed in the first place.”
There is no reaction. Not at first anyway. Iris blinks, watching with a gaze that peers straight at her, not above, or below. The woman matches her in height, albeit not in frame. She is skinny like a model is, with a bust and bottom to match; though she was obviously born with a body that she didn’t hate, she had clearly taken it upon herself, with whatever wealth she had possessed, to modify it further, just like she also did once.
Swiftly, Iris grabs the glass and downs the alcohol without a word. There is no thankfulness, barely even an act of acknowledgement. She has just been served, so there is no need. There was rarely ever a need for her to be grateful.
And all of that is already too generous for this woman’s luck tonight.
“Well…?”
Iris’s eyes draw to the woman’s dress again. It’s shiny, made from some sort of peeled serpent. It hugs her waist so snuggly that it’s practically a second skin, and yet it only flatters her, instead of mobbing her.
Normally, she would consider such an unnaturally skinny body a waste of good money. It was an adequate display of status, sure, but she found it disgusting in the outward, flashing implications. Something like that did not usually exist for the woman after all, no, but for instead the plethora of men they had holed up in golden cages inside their wet brain matter, staring back at them with judgemental mouths and rotting tongues, nonexistent and yet plentiful in their object-creating implications.
But here…
Her own dress matches the other woman’s in cadence. Its hue is diluted, but not unfashionably so; it cost fifty million dollars to adorn every centimeter of its silk with purple diamonds, most of that money having gone to the cost of labor and cover-ups. And a number of human rights violations so massive it would have made even the devil blush.
Twenty thousand people died to make this dress; Iris would have it no other way.
“…Did you come up here to merely flirt with me, or did you actually need something?”
Her voice comes out like chalk, heavy but smooth. Iris stares deeply into her, brow furrowed, but is unable to thresh out what is running through that head.
The woman laughs in response. “Ha, you’re just as thorny as everyone says. Must you assume I am here on a love plundering mission? I came simply because I desire like-minded company.”
Iris clicks her tongue. “You are no like-minded individual to me, Ms…”
She stops, freezing. A realization forms in her throat like lead as her head and heart digest her mistake.
Oh no, I don’t know her—
People were supposed to introduce themselves to her, not the other way around. Iris Dark was born to lay the foot into others; after all, it was only then would she be able to ascertain their worth. Their name was unimportant to her, while hers were bonded in weights of gilded might.
Glaring, her mind is unable to discern the intentions through the wined tannins staining her tongue and the complete blank she is drawing up on what flattery of this caliber meant for her. She nearly breaks the empty glass in her hand from the dissonance piercing her thoughts until the woman takes it and smashes it over her knee.
“My name is Gardenia Knightsnow,” she replies, foxily, with eyes as flashy as her lipstick. They are not stripping nickel, no, instead pale quartz, polished to an adamantine shine. “I am the CEO of the Aetherolis Spiral Firm, the premier financial destination of demons, fae, and all sorts of hyperdimensional entities which find themselves needing to navigate a world of modern technology. I’m sure you of all people are aware of how often those types get stuck attempting to traverse the different planes of existence…?”
Aetherolis Spiral…Iris recalls the name vaguely. Thrice she heard it in acquisition discussions. It was a company with a board staffed to the brim with G.O.C apologists, and yet they all hated D.C. al Fine with such a fervor that she contemplated using their collective as an espionage tactic. The G.O.C was going to be instrumental to her political plans moving forward, but there were some heads that needed to roll first…
“…Odd surname,” Iris replies, flatly. “Are you a fae?”
“Heavens no,” Gardenia replies, shaking her head. “But you’re not the first to ask me such a question. My mother won it in a duel with one. How long ago, I forget…”
She takes a deep breath, grabbing another crystal glass, but not for wine this time. No, this time it’s a bottle of juice, and out she pours a beautiful pearlescent liquid, forming thin membranes of fleshy nacre wherever it lands on that thin translucence.
Iris’s eyes widen at the idea of her taking her drink. But, once again, Gardenia grins, holding it out for her, defying her.
“…Ms. Dark…”
Her voice is sultry. Not like that of a succubus, but of a genuine…appreciation?
For the first time in a long time, Iris wasn’t sure how right she was about anything.
“…You look ghastly when you bristle,” Gardenia continues. “I promise you, I will not dare to pillage from your larder. Not only do I have manners, and value my life…I also know who earned these spoils…”
Nothing is said as Iris looks down at the glass, her pupils dilating. Her face drips with a heat she can’t quite recall having before as she pours over Gardenia’s words to roll away from the uncertainties searing her throat.
Earned…oh yes. She did indeed earn all of this; she did it all by herself too. With her own hands and her own mouth. How studious and clever of Gardenia to acknowledge such might, how dutiful and tasteful too.
An ache begins swirling in her stomach, in her tense muscles and her brain. It weighs down upon her back as she bites an obsidian-coated lip, unaware that Gardenia’s smile has slipped from capriciousness into lasciviousness watching her.
Ever since she was a young child, Iris Dark had a hunger gnawing at the inside of her. At first, it was only just formless whispers, telling her to do what she wanted and that adults had no dominion over her. Soon, it blossomed into bountiful blooms that spoke of her taking the world into her own hand, razing Eden’s garden to make it her own concrete jungle, overflowing with as much runes, magic, beauty, finesse, and might as her body could handle.
What satiated the gluttony inside of her was more factories to run how she pleased, more land to feed the veins of ethereal blueprints. More bodies to generate profit, pulping their swollen arteries like spoiled, rancid milk, processing out the other side of their spent carcasses as pure, unadulterated capital, unending in its influence and its potential, more souls to lay down the foundation for her ambitions with their bones and sinew.
What Iris loved above all else was endlessly gorging herself on more people to tell what to do. This was the true, most basic essence of that which they called “power”.
Gardenia hovers her hand around Iris’s own, staring into her deeply. Iris looks down at it, curious at its pale pallor, until she suddenly finds herself considering it akin to marble. Beautiful, carveable marble…
She backs up, smiling for the first time tonight. Her feet root into the cold stone floor for a single second, before she finds herself moving again, moving in line with what is akin to a leading role. To the biggest velvet recliner she goes, the one snuggled comfortably in the middle of her massive stash of food is, upon which she spreads her legs and widens her eyes like an owl perched upon an oak tree, talons unseen.
Gardenia chuckles, following her. Iris watches the way her hips sway with great anticipation, her breathing quickening as fast as it can under three glasses of wine. Had she held more sense in her spilling brain, the way her guarding chains were snapping would have been the cause for a ferocious alarm.
This Gardenia—this white flower cloaked in argent beauty—it’s blurring from an intruding someone in her mind, a soul to control and align into something that pleased her eyes the way a painting did. Static, with heavy meaning and beauty…but ultimately meant to be consumed in the end by the heart and brain.
Ah, what do her intentions matter when possession is beginning? As long as Iris came out on top, nothing else mattered…right?
Gardenia takes a golden tray and piles several confectioneries onto it. Looking at the wine bottle, she ponders it for a second, looking back to Iris. Their eyes connect like stacked coins.
You will know what I want if you know what’s good for you, Iris thinks, heat flooding down her legs slowly, coiling all the way to her toes. She pulls out the gun and places it onto her lap. It slips off haphazardly, but it is still within easy reach.
“A woman always ready to pounce, eh?” Gardenia smiles, reaching for several small macarons. “No wonder my sister was scared of your acquisition of our company.”
“She has every right to fear me,” Iris replies, stroking her ego in a way which splashes heat between both of their faces. “Especially because I heard she is a philanderer, one who only messes around with rich women, leeching off the money her company pours into her mouth. Or no, was that you?”
Iris narrows her eyes and Gardenia does not flinch. Her long, obsidian fingernails rap the edges of the couch, clicking loudly as they hit platinum edges.
Macarons quickly exchange themselves for cream puffs. Iris relaxes again, and Gardenia purses her lips, plating everything succulently before she finally takes her prostrating seat.
“If you assumed it was me, I wouldn’t be shocked,” she replies, coolly and watching Iris with great fervor. “We’re twins, actually, but I cannot stand the idea that our DNA is of the same quality. She is a useless, cotton-eating pig who is afraid of real effort, always relying on someone else to filthy their heels for her. I am ashamed of such behavior, so utterly.”
Iris stamps a stiletto. “Her enthusiasm for delegation is admirable, but only up to a point. It is blood, not mud, which purchases change—she is good for little else but slaughter if she is not willing to use her teeth.”
“Indeed, Ms. Dark…” Gardenia sighs demurely, leaning in closer to her, although they are not skin-to-skin yet. Her cologne is fresh, light, and bubbly. “It is so refreshing to hear someone speak such a truth like that… You have no idea what I put up with every…single…day…”
No reaction. Except of cavernous, poker-face eyes, poised like a spear. Gardenia traces freshly-cut nails across the hard surface of the plate, watching Iris with deep breaths. Both of their faces flush, but it is invisible under heavy foundation.
“…It is nothing compared to what I put up with,” Iris quips back to her, eager to have the upper hand here. It is also true, in her mind; to be as efficient as possible, small cuts needed to be made to her stomach. Small chips of her money, status, property, and power had to be taken to feed the carrots for those deigned to do her bidding—they were to grow into fruitful trees with fat flowers and even fatter fruit which would feed her, overload and soak her mouth with satisfaction until she reached the cores and there was nothing left but dry seeds.
But all of that was painful. Iris would never die by a thousand paper cuts, no, she is no such hellishly weak starling—but there were days when she wanted to. There were days when her brain would not stop screaming at her for control, when her own thoughts consumed her with a hunger that needed to be filled, filled, filled, lest her greed hollow her out body and nickel-leaded soul. There were days when she could not swallow the acquiescence to compromise, when she could not trust in the lackadaisical buffoons, the prattish imbeciles, the bureaucratical dullards that she needed, unfortunately.
Their failure weighed on her more riotously than it ever would them. There was no damnation heavier than her own unadulterated fury, no torture worse than her own hunger eating her intestines like an ouroboros, no greater calamity in the history of the universe than Iris Dark not getting exactly what she wanted every single second of every single day.
“…I can only imagine,” Gardenia replies, as if she is reading her mind.
Iris nearly raises a fist to her, her heart bubbling over like warbling embers. But instead, Gardenia positions herself into her lap, her legs slipping over her bare, soft skin.
“…The other conglomerates mutter of you having killed the original Marshall and Carter,” she whispers, leaning in. “I heard the prime minister of Britain—I was visiting her because she owed me a favor—speak of investigating you for those murders, but no one can find what jurisdiction it happened in, if at all.”
Dark pupils widen. Gardenia stares into Iris deeply, finding herself pressed into the softness of plump, stuffed comfort, both of skin and fabric. Both of their lips drip with flashing intent, intense hues of biting desire hiding behind metaphorical fangs whiter than any star could hope to be.
But Iris will not tell her what the truth is. Not here, not not now, not as her. As a corpse, maybe. When she’s limp and lifeless, her pale skin forced paler by a pallid pallor, strung up in some parting, pearlescent parlor.
But for now, she will do alive. She will do in giving to her a new need that her esophagus burns to have, burns to crush and ooze between her hands.
This was the purer form of what Skitter flirted with in his spare time, no? With what Robert deigned himself to whenever he wanted to lord over another man? How deep could this well go, propped up by more money and bodies than a factory farm bursting at the seams?
A new kind of hunger was seeding, one as old as humans themselves.
Gardenia continues, now tracing her hands up Iris’s arms as she sets the plate down on top of her chest.
“I too killed for my position, you know.” She hovers her lips over bare, peachy skin. “I shot my mother dead as my father watched me from beyond the grave, driven to suicide by her madness. I killed her and I got away with it because they tried me in America and the gloves refused to fit.”
Gardenia pants as Iris’s heart flutters, as if she was confessing some undigested sin as green as a narrow leaf. But Iris could not see that weakness, or her own—all that floods her eyes is the unabashed ruthlessness of the act, the similarity between their own guts for power, the aching of her own body changing up its tune to now set its sights on ensnaring on this pale bloom, inching its waist up her veins to produce the most wicked of smiles. All that whets a wetting appetite is this savage desire for power which had come to her to lay its head against her altar, so knowing of its place and yet able to keep up with her at a manageable pace.
With intents of sizzling white, Iris takes a hand to Gardenia’s chin and flips the switch between them. Oh, she had really struck gold now. This waxy flower had aimed her spear at the exactly the second proudest moment of Iris’s life, and now there was no way she was going to leave a moment to revel in it unturned.
“And are you sorry?” she asks cheekily, but still with dignified manners. She needs another glass of wine soon to ignore how her brain tells her this is a fleeting joke, how Gardenia is a bug to be squashed. Is playing this kind of game not a form of satisfying one’s greed? Is this not just another way to spend what she had earned?
There is no hesitation in Gardenia’s voice as she gasps, but steels herself by snickering and bringing Iris’s legs closer together with her own.
“Of course not, Ms. Dark. I would never be…”
Iris coos, in a manner not unlike the noblewoman of the house giving a command. “The power and the money was worth it, wasn’t it…?”
She narrows her eyes like a cat pleased with itself. Gardenia straddles her again, looking down at the food and at both of their dresses. They’re both going to be a mess of smudged fluids soon, but it doesn't matter.
Nothing is said between them as Iris puts a hand around that waist to cement them together, her the rooting anchor, the deep root system starving for more. Gardenia grabs a stray bottle of brandy neither noticed until now from behind Iris’s head, swallowing dry spit as she opens the bottle and nearly takes the first sip before laughing and turning downwards.
“The first and best sacrifice always goes to the gods,” she says. “Here…”
To black lips it goes, and it’s just a few seconds of liquid until Iris swipes the bottle to deny her. Swirling around that deep red, she slides the bottle behind her head back to its unnoticed abyss before she pops a cream puff into her mouth.
The sugar and pastry melt quickly with the burning alcohol. It sends a hot heat to her legs that with wide eyes, she pulls Gardenia in as tightly as she can with her legs for.
Neither is minding the mess, the crumbs, or the delicate confectionary smearing between them. If anything, it adds to the scene. The picture. This hole they were both sliding slickly into.
Fuck, she really was something of beauty. A unicorn bathed in moonlight, streaked with silver over jewelry so eager to be owned…her body was a marvel too, with hips and shoulders so broadly, immaculately sculpted, complemented by an hourglass at both ends surely capable of being filled as well…
…
Without another word, they kiss. They kiss like the auction isn’t ending, like two souls on top of the world, star-staring blossoms open and wanting for the night to come, take and press down into them.
They kiss like they are equals, like one has not stepped down from her throne on high to mingle with a mortal. A throne made of sand-blasted cast iron that normally would have poisoned all who put their mouth to it.
When Iris Dark breaks for a breath, she barks softly some wanting command at Gardenia, just to convince herself one last time. Without a word, Gardenia obeys, and soon, the two find themselves capitulating to pleasure as the lights dim.
December 12th, 2013
Silence. It is 4:51 am on a calm, freezing winter day.
Iris Dark jolts awake exactly thirty-nine minutes before her alarm. She pants, shuddering as her mind comes to from an aimless nightmare of someone standing over her. They sat upon a throne of black, nightless stone, carved from her bowels and spit as she struggled in front of them, in front of the eyes of millions, debased into the ground to a rank even lower than the worm.
There is no stumbling out of bed, only an acknowledgment of her situation. Anxiety pulses around her, but she repeats a mind-bound mantra and an apoptotic aphorism, and soon she is soothed. Soon, she has asserted herself as being in complete control of her surroundings, her body, and herself. No weakness can be had while there is still work to do, no tears shall exist while her stomach still lives and breathes, for it will hunger soon for more blood.
Such an existence would be too robotic for any human to survive. Nay, the thought of it ran against the basics of human need, as it was literally hardwired into DNA like threads of microscopic rubies. Just as chlorophyll necessitated the need for light, so did the human mind (and the even more base mammalian instinct) require on some level companionship, tenderness, touch and care. Especially in its formative years, the most vulnerable and plastic of youth, so aching and wanting of the world’s safety.
But Iris Dark was no normal person. No, on most days she barely felt like a person at all. She was born into this world with flesh and blood as one knew such concepts to bleed, but only as an entity, little more. The real passion behind her existence was that ravenous gluttony for power consuming her, allowing her to feel an identity only when she was wringing submission out of someone, somewhere, or something.
There, she saw herself for a single moment. There, she saw herself as she did when she was twenty-one, emerging from the foggy darkness in a shiny car with the darkest, most expensive wine she could ever possibly get her hands on. Emerging from that foggy darkness not as a lost, formless creature known as a “boy”, but as a beautiful, grown, mature woman.
Finally, her body belonged to her then. Finally, what she could see as a personality did too. She saw a small glimmer of light in herself, a light she so desperately craved, as all humans do, even if she would have been loathe to admit it. Iris would have been loathe to admit she was of the same frame and skeleton as the rest of humanity, but it was true. She was, in the end, no more special than them except that she had a lot of money, a lot of magic, and a lot of people willing to do whatever she wanted.
…For now.
All of that would change so very far into the future. One day, her plans will transform her into something greater, and transform this world with it. Hopefully by then, she will have fully shed the disgusting and quivering tremors of emotional sniveling her mind craved, the disgusting notions of self-identity and gnawing hunger which still ate at her like gnarls on a tree.
You would never be able to get her to say it, but realizing she was a woman was the highest point of her life. It was the highest, most euphoric moment she ever experienced, laced with glittering hope like no other that maybe she could do this, maybe there was hope for her. Hope for what, she didn’t know, nor did she want to, for she was too mired in her ways and had tasted too much of the moneyed pomegranate tree to be able to change.
But it was still hope. Though a mirage, its afterimage left the impression that perhaps there were more humble circumstances out there somewhere she could have been born into, guided by brighter conditions, by adults with loving hearts to notice something was wrong with her as a child, that she was never in a stable state of mind. Not able to reach the same milestones of the id as others, not able to formalize a perception of herself.
But it’s the thought that counts.
It’s the thought that counts to ten as she’s in her bathroom and remembers that for the first time in her life, her bed is not empty.
She takes a deep breath, waiting for movement.
Nothing. Gardenia does not stir. She does not rouse, even.
What a heavy sleeper.
Iris growls to herself as she grabs a bathrobe to cover herself, the smell of bodily fluids acrid and souring. Sour like battery acid, like salty, brining claws ripping into her flesh.
That…that thing over there…she brought her down so low into her own carnality…
Iris did not like to get her hands dirty. Though she was perfectly fine with murder, the act itself was demeaning, soddening. It was an act she enjoyed up until she had to look at the corpse and found her disgust pushed just a little bit further than she found comfortable, and she was not a woman who wanted to be uncomfortable. The termite-brained techbros she had to work with and their idiot parties would never be able to understand the truth.
But what is she to do? Gardenia was critical to her plan now. While the two swapped positions last night, they also swapped stories. Gardenia’s board was now more critical to be rid of than ever, for their zealotry was burning, decaying. They were the war fetishists to end all war fetishists; sharp-toothed clowns who demanded the death of al Fine and the razing of the world akin to a second Ichabod.
They were a group of nutcases who wanted back the 1950s and all of the weapons that came with it. Because of that, they needed to be rid of, wiped off the face of the earth.
Was her air-headed twin capable of understanding the crocodiles she had underneath her feet?
…
Iris takes a deep breath as she vomits in her mouth thinking of Gardenia cooing over her, coaxing her to speak of her little fears. The fear she had of looking weak in public, of her going outside and realizing she didn’t part her hair the right way over where it was a little thin. Fuck, the HRT was supposed to have fixed that—Percival went bald early in his life, she wasn’t going to let that happen to her!
The fear of emptiness still, dragged out and unabated. It was Iris’s savior, but it was a terrible tormentor. She knew if she gave into all of her plans fully, she would sink into that deep, deep, deeply, until one day it would become normalcy. One day, it would just be who she was.
And…where she is right now…
Something less than a self still exists to protest that fate, as weak and meaningless as such will be. There is no turning back now, no depending on others except to bow and grovel at her feet…
But that would mean that Iris would no longer have a mirror upon which to find herself in. Sure, fear and intimidation reflected upon others as purely as her joy and ecstasy could, but she was not stupid. Anyone could be cruel; not everyone could be happy.
…Percival…
Iris thinks of him as she exhales. As he tells her she is doing a good job, as she is rewarded with candy and a pat on the head for reciting correctly some piece of history to him.
One deep breath. Two deep breaths.
Five, ten, thirteen. He was there for her and she hated the way he looked. For years, he told her she was going to grow up to look just like all of the photos of himself he kept in his parlor, the ones he was so proud of. The ones entombed in embossed metals, dated so cleanly, with penmanship she could never get out of her head. His handwriting was immaculate, unfortunately.
Air continues to fill her lungs, exiting just as methodically, as mechanically and stoically as living cells could manage.
But he was still there for her, despite his flaws. He was just as cruel as she is now, but not towards her. His hand was there and she followed where he pointed, his mouth was oft loose and yet still he spoke of pride in her growing progress.
Splashing water in her face, warm water, meant to dissuade her puffy eyes, she looks at herself, wondering if he ever cared. If he really loved his granddaughter, loved the her she became and not the son the rest of the family would blame.
It is a question which brings her back to being there in his study, wholly dependent upon his words and wisdom, for without his bloodline, she would be nothing. She is no longer a Darke, but she did not get rid of the root darkness which gave such a name power. He, and everything he stood for and came from is attached to her personhood regardless, and the only way to be completely rid of his influence would be to purge what little self of her remained.
…
If Gardenia is occupying the same space in her mind as Percival Darke is, then there is only one thing left to do.
Flinging open the cabinet door behind her mirror, she shoves aside bottles of mint facial masks. She is not looking for them, no, she is instead looking for a small cardboard box with lightly shaking hands.
When they find what they’re looking for, she slips the box out and closes the door.
With another silent movement, Iris now turns her attention to a closet behind her. It unseals itself with sterile, fluorescent lights stripping away all that she feels to the tune of sleek carbon steel, barrels cold and lifeless.
She selects a shotgun with zero hesitation. It is the same kind one selects to hunt deer when they do not care for retrieving the carcass, the kind for creating firework messages in brain matter.
Heat rises in her chest as she loads and cocks it. Disabling the safety with one finger, she slowly makes her way to that sleeping beauty naked in her bed.
Iris towers over Gardenia, looking at her with eyes as blazing as melting nickel, straight from the core of the earth. They are almost the color of her, her entire being, her soul, but they are more cutting. There is more serration, along every vein and capillary, every centimeter of exposed, wet white flesh.
So peaceful… She certainly looks the part of a woman who could tear the world apart with her beauty.
That beautiful long, silver hair…
This is for the you who saw me naked, she thinks. Her shadowy silhouette is pure darkness against Eurtec below her, alight in its smog and haze-smeared lights. This is for you who made a silly, lovesick fool out of me.
Without another word, Iris fires the shotgun straight into her face. Eager to be rid of her flights of fancy, she unloads twice more, one in the legs and one in the torso.
The sound cascades throughout the Death Pyramid like ripped, violated stone. There wasn’t even a reaction to the sound, not even an eye open as she realized what happened.
Simply here one second, and then gone the next.
Iris would be damned if she managed to pull off some trite, cliche, Hollywood-style begging for her life. It would have mussed things up worse than they already were, would have had her wading deeper into muddy, muggy waters of emotional attachement.
Silence falls over empty halls as Iris stares at the body, its gore and brains splattered everywhere over the sheets and bed frame. Shivering and turning her nose up, she sighs, running her fingers over her flecked-with-specks-of-blood arm until she can bear the quiet no longer and pulls out her phone.
“Robert?”
He’s nearby. He’s supposed to visit her later for a meeting.
“Yes, we still have a lunch scheduled for today, but I have something else for you to do. You’ll know it when you see it.”
Best to deign him to clean this up instead of one of her housekeepers. Not only would she hate having to go through the effort to kill them too (because no NDA could ever cover this, let’s be real) but not enough time has passed since his inheritance of the company for him to have fully grown into the shoes she wanted him to wear.
No, Robert Eisen Carter still had some sense of grace to him. He still wore a smile in his spare time despite all of the posturing Iris had done to remind him of who his new boss was. That was excusable at first, when she thought it was a simple grieving process for what happened to his dear old man that she didn’t know he didn’t care much for.
But no. He was still holding on. The reason why, she could not give less of a rat-eaten shit about, but it meant he was not yet the knife she needed him to be. Not yet the hellhound she needed ready to unleash onto others at a moment’s notice. She needed him out of the bookworm facade he still kept up around her; she needed him to plunge from dreams of being an author into pure, raw machiavellianism, deeper into the unfeeling narcissism that she knew he was capable of, granted to the Carters by both their nurturing and their birthright.
“Don’t be late. You know what will happen if you are.”
She needed him an obedient shell, the same as with Skitter, whom she had molded into the perfect idiot by giving the most abused and neglected of the Marshalls more money than he could ever possibly hope to spend.
What better way to grind Robert into dust than with the blunt, forceful trauma of seeing a desecrated corpse up close?
She smiles as he says he’ll be on his way in a stuttering tone, clearly having been interrupted in that library he loved so much. His voice wavers and she hangs up abruptly, gleeful of how he must have flinched at that.
“Killing two birds with one stone…yes, yes,” Iris mutters to herself, turning around to the corpse.
“You first…and then your god-awful twin next. Your company’s looking at a pretty hostile takeover, isn’t it Ms. Knightsnow?”
Gardenia Trinity Knightsnow. Iris looked up her full name on the car ride home, in the few moments she was catching her breath from sucking face with this despicable mongrel. A trinity of bad things certainly was about to happen to her, that’s for sure.
“Oh well, you know what they say. All’s fair in love and war, hm?”